Wish you could transfer your music and movie collection to your smartphone with a bit more speed? Current-gen microSD cards might not be that zippy, but Samsung’s just announced that their first UHS-1 microSD started rolling off the production line last month and will be heading to retail outlets very soon.

With maximum read speeds of 80MB/s, the cards are just under four times as fast as today’s average microSD card. Initially, Samsung is only producing 16GB cards, but they’ll be offering up larger capacities as soon as they can.

While faster microSD cards are certainly good news for those of you with expansive media collections, there’s another reason it’s particularly exciting news coming from Samsung: the Galaxy S3.

It’s been rumored that Samsung’s next hero phone will feature USB 3.0 connectivity. If that’s true, it’ll let you fill up your new Samsung UHS-1 microSD card in a flash — assuming that write speeds have been improved as much as read speeds. Based on what comparative benchmarks have shown for other top-notch microSD cards, it’s reasonable to expect that they’ll be close (perhaps within about 10 to 20 per cent). Samsung didn’t offer up any numbers on that front in their initial press release, however, so we’ll have to wait and see.

Samsung’s presser does state that these cards offer ultra-high performance in LTE smartphones and tablets, but the truth is that they’ll provide a boost in just about anything that knows what to do with a microSD card.